


Desert Hearts

by soldierwitch



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 16:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21664654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soldierwitch/pseuds/soldierwitch
Summary: The moon has a way of laying bare what should be said and what shouldn't, of what needs to be heard, and what's too much to feel. What we can't say under the sun, we say at night in the desert, in the wasteland where few can witness the fragility of hearts worn and full and bitter, and resigned and aching for a chance.Season 2 speculation.
Relationships: Maria DeLuca & Alex Manes, Maria DeLuca/Michael Guerin, Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 38
Kudos: 75





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! It has been a while since I posted anything here, but here I am bearing fic of the angsty kind. Buckle up, people, hearts may not break here, but that's 'cause they're already broken. Happy reading!

Calling Michael is the last thing Maria wants to do, but she and Alex are stranded in the desert. Sherbert has quit on her, and they really shouldn’t be out in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere at night. For all they know about this place it could be coyote country and between her and Alex is a pair of knives, some mace, and a set of brass knuckles. Useful but not exactly an arsenal. She’d feel better if she had a gun.

Taking a deep breath in, Maria lets her eyes slip closed and projects. She thinks of where she is, her desperation, how tired she feels, and calls to Michael. Image by image she pushes until she feels him stir and then their connection sings, thrumming in such a way that Maria can’t help the gasp that escapes her lips.

Michael’s mind is chaos. She’s only touched it once before this, and she was drunk off her ass while doing it. They were laid across one of her pool tables, and he’d ribbed her into reading him. Once she’d locked on it was hard to let go. His mind was like the cosmos. A brilliance of stars, confounding in its make-up.

He’d kissed her hard when she’d started speaking of the universe that laid at the center of his mind. A planet gleamed like a jewel in the distance. Blue like Earth. Cloud wisps chasing each other’s tails. Land masses dotting its oceans. But it wasn’t Earth. Maria remembers laughing, whisky drunk she asked him if he was so full of himself that he believed his imagination to be a celestial being unto its own.

Her connection to him flared so bright during that kiss, it blocked out the stars. The planet vanished as if swallowed by a black hole, and then there was a raucous bang like the one that birthed the universe. Warmth cracked open inside her, and she let it carry her like waves toward the shore of his affection. They didn’t talk about it afterward. They should have, she knows that now. It wasn’t his imagination she was looking at, it was his home. 

Maria doesn’t hear Michael say he’s coming, but she feels it as sure as his hand holding hers. Like a caress to her side and over her heart. The feeling is too much. She stumbles out of the connection, hand grasping for the side of her truck as she pitches forward. 

“Shit service on my end,” Alex says coming around the side of the truck. “How about you…” 

Trailing off, Alex walks quickly to Maria’s side. “Hey,” he says, coming to stand in front of her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Maria says, catching her breath. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand; it tastes stale. She hopes Michael has a water bottle rattling around somewhere in Blue. “New party trick, need some time breaking it in.”

At Alex’s raised eyebrow, Maria elaborates. “I called Guerin,” she says straightening up. “The DeLuca family psychic package. Better than your 5G plan but with higher rates. Mixed bag but effective.”

“You called Guerin?”

Maria fights not to fidget under Alex’s gaze. They’ve talked about Michael a couple of times. And each time has been more awkward and horrible than the last. Still she answers, “Yes.”

“And you didn’t try Liz first?”

“No,” Maria says reaching into her truck bed and pulling out a blanket. She tries not to focus on it being the one Michael took a liking to after their trip to Texas. “What does it matter? Guerin picked up.”

Alex hums.

“What?”

He’s quiet for a moment and then sighs. Leaning back on the truck, head tipped up toward the moon, he says, “You haven’t talked to him in a month.”

Startled, Maria pulls the blanket around her tighter. It’s not cold, but breaking her connection to Michael as sharply as she did has left her goose-bumped and uncomfortable like she’s stripped herself of something vital. 

“No,” she admits. “I haven’t. We speak, but we haven’t talked. Secrets tend to create rifts. You’ve talked though.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Maria sees Alex stiffen. His mouth dips, closing in on a frown.

“He thinks about you,” she says, crossing into dangerous territory. Landmines litter this conversation, but she walks on deeper into it. “Whatever you’re working on has his mind all tangled up. He thinks I don’t know, but he’s been sneaking into the Pony to play guitar and settle his mind.”

“You’re sleeping in the backroom again?”

Maria nods. She used to hull up in there when the house got too quiet with her mom in assisted living. But now her bed’s ruined. She spent a week rolling over expecting to curl into Michael’s chest only for her cheek to meet the coolness of her sheets. He’d only spent a month in it on and off but the impression cemented anyway. Sleeping in the backroom was just easier. Less jarring and painful. Less a reminder of the nights he spent crawling into her bed all the while withholding the truth from her about who he is and what he’s done.

“What do you mean he thinks about me?”

She turns to Alex, takes in his profile. The sharp cut of his jaw. His dusty and wind tousled hair. The tight pull of his jacket over his folded arms. The soft roundness of his cheeks. 

If this were a few months ago, she’d have pulled his arm around her and made a crack about any man on Alex’s mind not thinking about him would be crazy and not worth his time. But it’s not a few months ago, and the man on Alex’s mind is the same one on hers.

“It’s not a psychic thing,” Maria says. “Just an observant one. I know what I’m seeing now so...he looks at his hand a lot. The bad one gone healed.”

“He told you about that?”

“Yeah. He told me. Figured I might as well know everything since I knew a piece of something. I wish you had told me though.”

Alex turns to her then. “My dad caught me and Michael the same night everything went to shit in the desert with Isobel and Rosa. He shattered Michael’s hand; I left; Michael stayed.”

It’s the kind of blunt edged response Maria has become accustomed to with Alex. “Thanks for the cliffsnotes to a story I’ve already been told,” she says with a little more bite than she intends. “But that’s not what I meant.”

Alex’s shoulders drop, he looks away from her. “Maria--”

“I’ll own my part,” she says. “I knew you loved him, I felt that. But I let him come to me anyway. And I let myself fall when I shouldn’t have, and you let me do it knowing who he is and everything that comes with that, Alex. You don’t think I would have liked to have known that the man I was letting into my bed burned the body of my best friend to save Isobel?”

Alex scoffs. “Don’t put that on me,” he says. “He was already there. You didn’t stop to ask me about it, you just did it. And that wasn’t my story to tell.”

“Right,” Maria nods and steps away from the truck. “Better to just let me find out like I found out about you and Michael. Sure was fun holding onto a shit load of history that wasn’t mine and a fuckton of guilt.”

“It must not have been a fuckton because it wasn’t enough to stop you from giving him a chance.”

Maria scowls, frustrated. “Yeah, well,I shouldn’t have.”

“You don’t mean that,” Alex says, he looks like he’s ten paces away from spitting mad. “I wish you did, but you don’t. If you meant it, you’d have called Liz, but you called Michael. I don’t know when but at some point he became your first call, Maria. The person you think of first when you need help.”

“He’s a mechanic, Alex,” Maria says, heart picking up rhythm. She knows what he’s getting at but it’s not like that. It isn’t. “Of course, I called him first.”

With a laugh, Alex runs a hand through his hair. It’s a sad laugh, one that dulls his eyes instead of brightening them. 

“When you did whatever it is that you can do,” he starts. “Did you tell Michael to bring tools or did you just tell him to come?”

Caught out, Maria doesn’t say anything. She showed Michael their location, and the roads they traveled. She impressed upon him her urgency and a bit of her fear. But she didn’t think about his garage or his tool kit or Sander’s tow-truck. She just thought of him getting to them, of showing up for her like he had been.

“You’re still lying to me,” Alex says. “If you think it’s saving my feelings, you’re wrong.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“Then you’re lying to yourself,” he says, looking over her shoulder to the fast approaching light coming down the road. “Thing is, part of me doesn’t want you to stop.”

Maria turns around and watches Michael pull-in several feet from her truck. He leaves the car running as he hops out of the cab. Backlit and sleep rough, Michael looks almost as worse for wear as she and Alex do. She feels a slight tug at her consciousness and takes an involuntary step forward. Her eyes widen.  _ He can’t _ , she thinks.  _ There’s no way-- _

Another tug and she’s suddenly warm all over. 

“You rang, DeLuca,” Michael asks when he reaches them. A weak smirk sits on his lips. His eyes are bloodshot. 

_ Fuck _ , she thinks, but composes herself enough to say, “Sherbert died,” and walks to the hood of her truck, trying to ignore the soft brush of Michael’s mind against hers.

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back, this time with Michael's POV!

When Maria walks away, Michael feels himself take a step forward after her. Eventually he’s going to hang himself with the lengthening bond between them. It may be frayed and slack, but the connection she opened was strong enough to knock him sober, and he’s an addict for punishment. 

His eyes drift to Alex. Over the last few months he’s grown used to his presence. Not exactly a constant but welcome in a way that’s not panicked and jittery like Alex is going to walk away. He hasn’t. Alex had said he's needed in Roswell, and he has no plans on leaving any time soon. Michael has been taking him at his word.

But they haven’t exactly packed away their feelings into nice, neat rows catalogued and categorized for posterity. He and Alex didn’t do nice, they certainly weren’t neat, and posterity implied a future which the two of them didn’t have. No, what they had was history that bled over the edges of everything, tinted every conversation with the potential for something more, and made him want so badly that his teeth ached with it.

“You lose a fight with a dust storm,” Michael asks. He’ll never be able to cut the tension between them but he’s gotten good at lightening it. Their form of communication isn’t exactly a song and dance, but it stopped being a fight, and Michael’s always taken what he can get. You give him an inch, he’ll steal a mile.

Alex rolls his eyes and snorts. He unfolds his arms, and Michael smiles a little at the gesture. The tightness around Alex’s mouth disappears in the wake of the friendly jibe. Alex is good at deflection, loaded sentences, and a solid verbal punch, but he hasn’t quite managed to conceal the slight sneer he gets when ticked off. It’s his tell, and Michael would bet his airstream that he and Maria were fighting about something before he arrived.

Before Michael can say anything more, Maria’s frustration begins to prickle at the edge of his consciousness like a needle. Poking and poking and poking and poking. 

Annoyed, Michael tears his gaze away from Alex and yells over to her. “DeLuca, back away from the truck.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re fiddling,” he says. “And I can see your phone light. Who’s the mechanic? Me or you?”

The light goes out, but Michael hears a pissed, “Asshole,” just as she turns it off. He laughs under his breath. This is the familiar exchange he’d been missing. They get under each other’s skin. Before Maria had discovered the plethora of secrets he had--strewn across her life like the discarded clothes he once left on her floor--they’d been playful. 

He’d walk into the Pony shaking off the long hours he spent with Liz, Alex, and Kyle looking for a way to bring Max back, and find her. She’s the brightest spot in the bar, possibly in all of Roswell, and he’d do whatever he could to make her laugh or bother her, whichever one got him her attention the fastest. He had one rule: don’t hurt her. And he’d fucked that up as spectacularly as he’s fucked up every good thing in his life.

Michael’s laugh dies when he turns back to Alex. The tension he had lightened has returned sevenfold and is threatening to choke him in its vice. He clears his throat suddenly feeling self-conscious and hyper aware that this is the first time he’s ever been with Alex and Maria at the same time.

“Go,” Alex says, voice cold and distant. He jerks his head toward Maria. “The faster you fix whatever’s wrong with her truck, the faster we can get back to Roswell. I’m going to see if I can get enough bars to text Kyle.”

Michael feels bile along with anger rise in him, but he tries to play it cool. Jealousy is not a feeling he likes very much. It feels too human, too vulnerable, and scratched raw. Alex’s ease with Kyle is quick to make his temper flare.

He knows what it is to fall into someone, he’s done it enough with Alex over the years, but Alex leans into Kyle. The two of them don’t even have to speak sometimes. Alex will have an idea, Kyle will pick up on it, and then they’ll be off and running, jackets grabbed off of chairs and out the door without a word to him or Liz. It’s not romantic or sexual, but it’s intimate in a way that Michael doesn’t like. 

Kyle is ten years removed from the kid he was in high school. He’s a doctor now. He’s distinguished and accomplished, but half the time Michael still wants to punch him in the face. He doesn’t think that desire is ever going to fade especially not with Alex moving past it like nothing happened.

Michael’s self-aware enough to know he’s done worse things than Kyle and will probably do more bad shit before his life is through, but the worst thing he’s ever done wasn’t to Alex. That’s the difference between the two of them not that that seems to count for anything in Alex’s books.

“You and DeLuca expecting to raise enough hell to need Dr. Douche on standby?”

“No,” Alex says slipping his phone out of his pocket. He doesn’t comment on Michael’s colorful nickname for Kyle much to Michael’s irritation. “We were supposed to meet-up. Go over notes. Have a beer. He’s getting off an extended rotation soon.”

Alex glances over to Maria. Michael can see he’s fighting himself about something, but in a moment his face is wiped clear, replaced with an indecipherable mask. He says, “Maria and I were looking for Mimi,” before unlocking his phone and stepping away.

Everything in Michael goes still and cold. Maria’s projecting. She hasn’t stopped since he arrived, and he knows she doesn’t realize she’s doing it. The flayed open emotion that’s slamming against his consciousness is so forceful it’s threatening to knock him over. It’s too personal to share willingly. He turns to her.

“Don’t,” Maria says, shaking her head. “He shouldn’t have told you that. That’s not why you’re here. You’re here to fix Sherbert, so just...just do what I called you for.”

“Maria--”

“I don’t need you to fix anything else,” she says, quickly. She’s shaking despite the blanket she’s wrapped up in. His by the looks of it.

“How long has she been gone?”

“Michael,” Maria says, fists tight in her blanket. “Please just do what I asked instead of what you think I need."

It’s not that her request is impossible for him. For the past month Michael’s done exactly what Maria’s asked. He’s stayed away from the Pony when she’s there, he’s let her decide when she wants to talk to him and for how long, and he’s let her be. He hasn’t tried to plead his case or get her to see his side of things. He knows that forgiveness is not in the cards for him.

They’re done. She said it, and she meant it. He hasn’t tried to touch Maria since she flinched away from him the night she found out. But not holding her when she looks like she’s about to fall apart feels like a knife twisting in his gut. And the sorrow dragging her heart down is dragging his down with it.

“Fine,” Michael says, but it’s not. Her pushing him away, and their bond pulling him closer is going to drive him crazy. He can feel the increasing tautness of their connection. Maria is trying to bury her feelings, but it’s a burial for two.

“Though you should know” he starts, walking over to her. “I feel what you feel. If you’re drowning, I’m drowning. I can pretend if you want. We’re both good at that. But it doesn’t change the truth.”

Maria laughs. The weight of her emotions recedes like the tide. A wall erects. But their bond is like water, it slips through the cracks. She is hiding, but there is no hiding place.

“It’ll fade,” Maria says.

Michael nods, but it’s not an agreement. All the bond did is confirm something he already knew. If she calls, he comes. What she needs, he’ll give. Even if that means feeling all of her and none of her at the same time. Even if it costs him his mind. 

Taking a deep breath, Michael tugs on their connection and watches Maria’s eyes narrow. 

“Like said, I’ll pretend,” he says, turning to look at her truck. “But it doesn’t change the truth.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback is appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took forever to write, and if I'm honest I'm not sure about it. But it's done, and that's what is important. So without further ado here is Alex's POV. Also...there will be one more chapter after this one because apparently I'm still not done with this story.

All Alex needs is one bar. One goddamn bar, and the universe can’t even give him that. Everything else is on the table. A broken home, an abusive, homophobic father, a war to drown his anger in, and a love that scrapes and claws at his dignity. But asking for a single signal bar as a sign that his life isn’t completely in the trash isn’t doable. 

This is why he stopped wishing on birthday candles and shooting stars, the universe is indifferent and too much like his brothers. Alex has to give something to get something, and he is all out of things to give. He gave up his music for fatigues and a shot at proving his father wrong. He gave up love over and over and  _ over again _ to be a real Manes man. A man whose feelings rule neither his head nor his heart. But all of it was a lie. He didn’t become a stronger version of himself. 

Strength is not boxing with his father’s shadow. It isn’t turning away from love for the promise of an acceptance that will never come. It’s standing in the goddamn desert looking for one goddamn bar as the man you love wades through the wreckage of his relationship with someone else. It’s listening to the silence of their unsaid words as their ruins continue to crumble around them. Ruins that they wouldn’t have if you hadn't run from him, and if he had waited for you.

Life slows down for no one, Alex knows this but he thought it would have paused for just a little bit. Long enough for him to stand in Michael’s trailer with his hands shaking trying to explain the last ten years and the mistakes he made. But it didn’t. Life sped forward at its normal clip, cutting his speech to a fraction of what he wanted it to be and leaving him with the promise of more that it didn’t deliver on. 

Life handed him a conversation that began and ended in the span of seconds. “I’m done,” Michael had said. “I’m done with hoping for a day that will never come. I’m done with trying to get back to a place we’ll never see again. I’m done.”

Alex had put the blame on Max’s death right after Michael’s mother died. He’d chalked it up to anger, maybe even spite. And he figured given time that Michael would soften as grief worked its way through his heart. Then they learned they could save Max, and Michael’s smile stretched wide across his face. He’d picked Liz up and twirled her around before turning to him and smiling impossibly wider. His eyes danced. 

Then Michael said he was going to the Pony. He laughed through his sentence. Maria didn’t know about Max. She didn’t know about aliens. But that didn’t stop Michael from grabbing his keys and leaving. He said he’d be back in the morning. Alex remembers he looked one last time at him and then looked away. It was at that moment that it hit home, Michael meant it when he said they were done. 

He didn’t mean that Max had died. He didn’t mean that he needed time. He meant they were over. And in the weeks after that moment, the weeks that slipped into months, seeing that Michael and Maria are over, too, hasn’t helped. Alex is grown enough to admit that he thought it would, but it hasn’t.

Their relationship is like a diverging road. One he would erase if he could. Looking at the two of them is like looking at a world of his own creation that he isn't a part of. They’re their own entity. Their own history in a language he doesn’t understand. And it’s strange loving two people who feel so distant and foreign.

They changed the rules, rewrote the universe, and upended his world view. They were both home to him in their different ways, and now he feels homeless. Like the locks have been changed, and he’s been evicted. Alex hates thoughts like these. He hates the drama of his mind echoing through the silence, over-analyzing and churning and thinking too much. But all he has is a cell phone with no ba--

Alex’s phone buzzes.

8:45 PM

_ Hey, just got off work. Gonna shower and then I’ll meet you at Skip’s. _

9:50 PM

_ Alright. I’m in the booth to the back right. Yes, the one closest to the exit. No, not on your side.  _

10:20 PM

_ Yo, Alex, shoot me a text if you’re running late. The bartender keeps looking at me in pity like I’m being stood up. _

10:50 PM

_ Am I being stood up? Jokes aside, Alex, give me a call. _

11:30 PM

_ Seriously, Alex, this is not like you. Are you okay? _

His phone rings. The tone is loud in the desert as it briefly jingles before Alex picks up the call.

“Finally,” Kyle says in relief. “Please tell me I’ve just been overreacting and you’re fine.”

“I’m fine,” Alex says, cutting his eyes to Maria and Michael who are staring as he talks. “But I’m stranded. Maria’s truck broke down.”

“Alright,” Kyle says, there’s the distinct sound of keys tinkling in the background. “Where are you?”

Alex relays the information to Kyle who repeats it back to him before saying, “I’m on my way,” and hanging up. No questions asked about their situation, just a plan and some action. Kyle’s task oriented, it’s a quality Alex appreciates.

“You could have told him that I have it handled,” Michael says, put out. 

Alex resists the urge to roll his eyes, he really does not have the energy to deal with this right now. He notices that Maria simply looks up at Michael. There’s something in her eyes that Alex can’t read, but then Michael looks down at her and it’s clear that he can.

It’s silent, but Alex swears they’re talking to one another even though their mouths aren’t moving. Their familiarity makes him uncomfortable as does the nod Maria makes in his direction and the half-there smile she gives him as she says, “I’m gonna wait by Blue.”

Michael watches her go, and it kills Alex to see the longing there. Longing is a painful feeling. Alex has never felt it as keenly as he has the last few months, and that’s exactly what’s on Michael’s face. It’s a look that stays when Michael turns his gaze to his. A look that settles and fixes into place as he walks over to him.

Seeing Michael’s longing for him doesn’t make Alex feel better. He’s resigned to it. He is used to the way Michael looks at him as if they’re worlds apart instead of right in front of each other within reach. All Michael has to do is brush his fingers with his and the distance would be nonexistent, but he never does, and Alex can’t be the one to do it. He didn’t end things; Michael did.

"She named your truck," Alex says by way of conversation. He’s not sure what Michael wants.

Michael shrugs. "It's what she's been calling it for years now."

“Right,” Alex says, it’s dry and bland. A cover for the sting he felt at Michael’s words. Sometimes he forgets that Michael and Maria have years together without him. Time spent in proximity even if it wasn’t in intimacy. But then he’ll be reminded in some way and the decade he spent away from Roswell, away from the two of them stares him in the face. It’s like staring at a fun house mirror. The parts are right, but they’re warped. 

Roswell is his home in so many ways, but there are times he feels like a tourist in his hometown. He supposes it’s his own fault. That’s what happens when you blow into town and blow right out with barely a hello and goodbye for years.

“I can fix the truck, Alex,” Michael says. “I just need a little time.”

Michael’s not pleading but there’s a note in his voice that sounds despondent. Alex is sure there’s a metaphor in Michael’s sentence somewhere, but he’s too tired to look for it, and he doesn’t really care for metaphors. He deals with hard facts and harsh realities for a living-it was bred into him--and the truth is he has to follow Michael’s lead on this. They’re done. It’s time he learned the lesson in letting go that’s been written on the wall for some time now.

“It’s fine,” Alex says, because it is. He and Maria were looking for different things. If he took her word for it about thinking of Michael as a mechanic first and foremost, then they’d both taken a look at their situation, assessed next steps, and came up with separate solutions. Alex wanted to get home; Maria had wanted something else entirely.

“I can take you and DeLuca back to Roswell,” Michael says, but Alex shakes his head.

“That’s not necessary,” he says. “Kyle’s coming.”

“He doesn’t need to.”

“I want him to,” Alex says firmly. At some point Kyle became Alex’s first call the way Michael became Maria’s. It’s different. He and Kyle share a history, too, but it’s one they forged as children not as adults. 

They’re still working on who they are to each other as men, still figuring out the bits of them that have changed and the bits that have stayed the same, but Kyle’s reliability is a trait he’s had since he was a kid. A swollen ego and peer pressure quieted that trait for a bit, but Kyle is still the boy Alex spent afternoons napping on wood floors with and sword fighting across freshly cut grass. He can count on him, and he needs that kind of dependability in his life. 

Michael tamps down on a lip curl, and he doesn’t have a right to that. He doesn’t, and Alex doesn’t want to see it even if his heart gives a little thrill at the inappropriateness of it.

“Fine,” Michael says, glancing at Maria. “Valenti can take you two back. I’ll stay here and work on the truck.”

He says it like he’s granting his permission, and Alex knows if he bristled at that, Maria did, too.

Alex looks over at Maria, and sees the way she pushes off Michael’s truck with her foot. Michael winces, but Alex doesn’t think it’s because of the bootprint Maria left on his bumper.

“I’m not leaving my truck,” Maria says when she reaches them.

“DeLuca--”

Maria holds up her hand, silencing Michael. Alex has never seen him do that before.

“I didn’t ask for your input,” she says. 

The sound of an approaching car catches all of their attention. It’s Kyle’s. He pulls in front of Michael’s truck and hops out.

“Hey,” he says in greeting to them all. Maria says it back, but Michael doesn’t say anything just crosses his arms. When Kyle scans him, Alex is reminded that he’s covered in dust thanks to the old, abandoned barn they’d searched for Mimi in. He’d opened the door and got a head full of the stuff for his trouble. He shook as much of it off as he could, but it hadn’t done much to help.

“You good,” Kyle asks.

Alex nods, and Kyle moves on, turning back to Michael and Maria.

“Do you need anything? I don’t know much about cars, but--”

“I’ve got it,” Michael says, interrupting. It’s gruff, but Kyle doesn’t mention it, he just looks at Maria. 

“I can take you home, too,” he offers.

Maria shakes her head. “I’m good,” she says. “I’m gonna stay with my truck. Someone’s gotta drive it home once Guerin gets it fixed.”

Kyle looks at both Maria and Michael. Alex wonders what he sees. Michael and Kyle have a work-related truce thanks to the mission to save Max, but Michael likes to tow the line of cordiality with grumpiness and sarcasm. As for Maria, Alex isn’t sure when she and Kyle last spoke. 

“Okay,” Kyle says, cutting through the awkward tension. “Well, we’d better go. I’m sorry about Mimi, Maria. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

Maria says, “Of course,” but it’s quiet. Alex doesn’t miss the way Michael steps closer to her or the way she turns slightly away from him.

Alex steps forward and catches Maria’s eye. “We’ll find her,” he says and moves the blanket slipping off her shoulder back up to cover her. “I promise.”

Maria just nods and gives him a weak smile, but it’s better than nothing. 

“Goodnight, Alex,” she says.

“Night,” he says back, he glances at Michael as he says it, looping him into his farewell.

Kyle gives a small wave, and then together he and Alex turn, falling in step back to his car.

Alex makes it thirty seconds before he checks the rear view mirror. He wishes he were someone who could stop looking back, but he’s not. He looks in the hope that Michael is looking too, but he’s not. Michael’s attention is on Maria as he tries to get her to look at him. Alex looks away, wondering when he’s going to learn his lesson.

“He looked at you first,” Kyle says, eyes still trained on the road.

“It doesn’t matter,” Alex says, though it matters to him. It matters more than it should.

“Doesn’t it?”

Alex doesn’t answer him, so Kyle changes the subject.

"You still up for those beers," he asks.

"Yeah," Alex says. "I could use a drink."

He ignores Kyle's considering glance and turns the radio on, putting a wall of sound between him and his thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback is appreciated.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback is appreciated!


End file.
